Well, we are back, and totting up the credit and debit sheet, Mr Litlove had 100% nice time, and I had an 85% nice time. There’s always something, it seems, that means I arrive back with a chronic fatigue relapse. But that’s much later in the story. For once, I took a camera with me, so given I’m still a little tired, we may be able to let the pictures do the talking.
I told you we were staying at Library Cottage, right. Well, this was it:
You can see we had big double doors onto a really gorgeous garden, and a huge skylight. The weather was excellent for most of the holiday and lying reading on the sofa with the doors open and the sun streaming in was pretty good. Apparently the current owners bought their house off of a barrister, and this was his work room, hence all the bookcases, which are now crammed with the most intriguing and eclectic mix of books:
We spent the evenings combing through the selection and reading out loud things that caught our attention. In fact, several evenings in a row, Mr Litlove read to me from Christopher Booker’s enormous tome, The Seven Basic Plots; Why We Tell Stories. The seven basic plots themselves were extremely interesting (tragedy, comedy, rebirth, overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest, voyage and return); the problem came when he started to tackle the past 200 years of story writing, most of which subverted or altered the basic plots in ways that Booker obviously thought were wrong and misguided, a form of cultural neurosis in a way. If you have to diss everything written in the past two centuries, the chances are good that there’s something wrong with the guidelines for judgement! Anyway, it was all very interesting.
On the Sunday we decided to visit a stately home and really we wanted to use our National Trust memberships, which we’ve got for the year. However, the owners suggested we visit the nearest to us, Parham House. This was a lucky break as it was by far and away the most amazing place I saw in the week, and so I was very glad we got to see it together.
This was the house from the approach – a long winding driveway through gently undulating Sussex grounds. It looked like an oasis and it sort of was. Inside the rooms were full of the most amazingly beautiful antiques. The house had been bought in 1922 by a wealthy couple who enjoyed collecting; they renovated the place, restoring it to its original condition (the Victorians had papered over the panelling and so on) and then filled it with anything relating to the families who had lived there.
The Great Hall – full of light from a series of high mullioned windows and cosier than most flagstoned halls.
The portraits were particularly astonishing. Mr Litlove kept asking the guides if they’d recently been cleaned, they looked so sharp and colourful:
The lovely Susan Villiers, looking a lot like Helena Bonham Carter.
In this room, the Green Room, you can just make out a picture of a kangaroo by Stubbs near the corner of the room. Apparently, Sir Joseph Banks bought the kangaroo back as a souvenir of his round the world trip with Captain Cook. Well, he bought back the skin of the kangaroo, and so Stubbs then reinflated it in order to paint the picture. This is perhaps why the kangaroo looks a tad… odd. Mr Litlove liked this story a lot.
My favorite story of the visit, though, concerned this bed in the Great Chamber:
It was bought by new (well, new in 1922) owner Clive Pearson for his wife, who was an avid collector of tapestry and embroidery. It was essentially one huge ornament, not intended for sleeping in as it was too precious and delicate for that. The frame dates from Henry VIII’s time and the canopy and bedspread date from c.1585, probably the work of French or Italian craftsmen – because at this point in time such needlework was a valued occupation and was therefore undertaken by men. I overheard the guide telling another visitor this and my first reaction was: of all the cheek! Now I wonder at my reaction and yet… well, okay, I just find that annoying. Mr Litlove said it was no different from male chefs, who had a status that your average cook did not.
And just as we reached the very top of the house, already overwhelmed by all we had seen, we found the Long Gallery, which almost topped the rest.
But we were a bit sated with beautiful objects by this point and so went out into the gardens. Guess what? They were gorgeous too.
See more pictures of the gardens at this site here: http://www.gardenvisit.com/garden/parham_house_and_gardens
So, that was our Sunday, and on Monday, Mr Litlove went yomping off across the fields to his Windsor chair-making workshop.
While he was there, I had some more adventures with stately houses and gardens, but we’ll do part 2 another day. That’s enough for now!
